Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Australian Politics and Policy
conflict over marriage equality and contestation about the place of sexual and
gender diversity education in schools. 2
This chapter discusses the different ways gender and sexuality are manifested
in Australian politics, and the key concepts mobilised by scholars and advocates
working on issues of gender and sexuality. It begins with the ways feminist and
queer scholars have questioned definitions of ‘the political’ that rely on a gendered
view of the public/private divide. The second part of the chapter focuses on political
participation, outlining social movements that have put issues of gender and
sexuality on the agenda, exploring the attainment of voting rights and considering
gendered patterns of voting. The third section explains how powerful norms and
ideas about leadership are gendered and sexualised, and the fourth addresses
institutions, both in terms of the gendered nature of political institutions and
feminist institution-building. The fifth part focuses on representation in both its
numerical and substantive forms, outlining the representation of women and
LGBTIQ+ people in Australian parliaments and exploring the role of political
parties and quotas. The final section of the chapter discusses media, backlash and
social change in the area of gender and politics. 3
Expanding politics: questioning ‘normal’
Politics has conventionally been viewed as being about government and the public.
But politics can also be defined in terms of power. Applying this broader view
of politics, we can see that the apparently natural division of public and private
subordinates women and children. In liberal political theory, the division between
state and civil society (public and private) is established through a fraternal social
contract that claims to free individuals from traditional hierarchies. 4 As Carole
Pateman and other feminist scholars have shown, however, this social contract
is based on a concealed ‘sexual contract’ in which the individual is implicitly
understood as a man who is the head of his household, with women and children
subsumed within the family – the private sphere, where men can do what they
wish. 5 As Pateman argues, ‘the doctrine of “separate but equal”, and the ostensible
individualism and egalitarianism of liberal theory, obscure the patriarchal reality of
a social structure of inequality and the domination of women by men’. 6
2 Williams and Sawer 2018.
3 At places throughout this chapter I use the terms ‘men’ and ‘women’ in a simplistic, binary way. I
acknowledge that this is not an accurate way to encompass differences in gender and that it excludes
people who are gender diverse. My use of these terms in this way reflects the fact that much of the
research I am summarising in the field of politics, as in scholarship generally, employs this model of
gender, and I acknowledge the value of scholarship that tries to move beyond this binary.
4 Pateman 1989, 118–40.
5 Celis et al. 2013, 6; Pateman 1989.
6 Pateman 1989, 120.
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